Cybersecurity 500 lists two Irish companies

The Cybersecurity 500 is a an industry list of cybersecurity companies compiled by Californian marketing and research company based on the recommendations of a range of experts including CISOs, VCs, security professionals and even journalists encountered at global security events and during research.

Although firms cannot buy their way on to the list per se, they can buy one of several dozen ‘positions’ near the top of the list for a year’s duration, an important point to bear in mind when reading it. How many took up that option remains confidential.

The February ranking (monthly updates are promised) has FireEye in top spot, ahead of Moka5, with AlienVault, Norse, Easy Solutions, Splunk, Lancope, Narus, Veracode and CyberArk rounding out the top ten in that order.

In an industry often seen as built around large anti-virus and infrastructure firms such as Symantec, Trend Micro and McAfee, this is an unexpected list of names some not that well known. As it happens, Trend sits in 13th spot, McAfee (Intel Security) at 34 and Symantec at a lowly 159.

The list of 500 ranks two Irish companies, Spam Titan (393) in Galway and VigiTrust (395) in Dublin. The former manufacturers email security appliances, while the latter is a security advisory and compliance services provider.

However, of the top ten, three have a major Irish presence: FireEye and AlienVault in Cork, and Splunk in Dublin, with a fourth, CyberArk, having a major partnership with Zinopy here.

The firm behind the Cybersecurity 500 explains that the intention was to create a list of firms worth watching rather than simply reflecting size and revenue. It repeats that none of the companies listed paid anything simply to be included.

This, of course, is what makes such listings interesting — they eschew conventional and sometimes misleading measurements tilted towards what was successful in the past.

The overwhelming majority of the 500 are US-based firms even if a handful (Check Point, ESET, Cyberroam, Radware and Tufin) are really non-US firms with US subsidiaries. The US domination of ‘hot’ security and start-ups is still noteworthy.

The UK representation is small: BAE Systems, Avecto, Boldon James, Mega AS, Protectimus, Sophos, Digital Shadows, BT, Acunetix, and Burp. The highest placed is Swivel Secure at number 197 with the other nine all at 350 or lower.

One can always quibble with the judgments of a single list’s methodology based partly on ‘buzz’ with an unknown number paying to be far higher up than they would otherwise be. There will be sceptics galore.

Time will tell how seriously the list is taken by an industry short on even subjective measures of significance. But it is a good bet that start-up CEOs and their investors in particular won’t complain if they make it into the 500 at some point.